


Say It Now

by Noducksinpond



Category: The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Awkward Flirting, Caitlin works in the morgue and Cisco as a CSI too, F/M, Iris as a detective
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-16
Updated: 2015-08-16
Packaged: 2018-04-15 01:49:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,269
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4588455
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Noducksinpond/pseuds/Noducksinpond
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>But Barry Allen might be an awkward dork, but at least he seemed like a more fun guy to work with than the last cut and dry guy they´d gotten assigned to their case.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Say It Now

**Author's Note:**

> This started quite simply as me thinking about Iris as a detective and then it just sort of got longer, and longer, until we have this. Hope you enjoy it.

It´s a chilling morning, and Iris hugged her jacket tighter around her. The CSI is late, which is annoying. Iris and her partner Eddie Thawne has been here for more than 20 minutes, but they can´t get any further until the CSI shows up. She was just about to call the station and ask if they´d even sent a CSI to look at their vics, when she spots a slightly gangly, tall, brown haired guy running towards the crime scene. He looks young, a lot younger than the CSI´s she has encountered so far. Most of them look like they haven´t left a lab in 10 years.

“Sorry, sorry,” he manages to breathe out when he stops in front of her, he looks just about ready to drop dead from exhaustion, and Iris resists the urge to smile at him. She´s still pissed at him for showing up this late. Assuming this is the CSI of course, but considering that nobody else has shown up, he probably is the CSI. “Sorry, my train got delayed. Well, I woke up too late and then missed the train. Won´t happen again. Sorry.”

“You´re the CSI?” Eddie asked, and the brown haired guy nodded. Eddie looked slightly disbelieving, and Iris shoved an elbow into his side and gave him a look. She may only have worked with Eddie for a couple of months, but he was usually nice. A great guy, so the fact that he already looked like he didn´t like the CSI was weird to say the least. Eddie got along with everyone at the station, even captain Singh could stop himself from yelling at him. Plus the CSI might be late, but he didn´t deserve to instantly be judged. This could very well just be a one time thing.

“Barry Allen,” the CSI replied, seemingly oblivious to the look Eddie had given him. He smiled at both of them, and Iris had to admit that he had a nice smile. That was irrelevant with 2 dead guys hanging in a tree though. Those two were really the only relevant thing when they were on duty. Barry Allen looked from Iris to Eddie, as if he was trying to analyze them too. “You´re detective West, and you´re detective Thawne right? Or did I get the wrong crime scene this time?”

“That´s us, and no you didn´t,” Iris replied with a small, but hopefully friendly enough smile. Barry seemingly didn´t know what to do with that, so he just looked into the ground for a moment or two, before he looked back at her with a slightly awkward grin. That made her heartbeat quicken a little bit, but she ignored it.

“I guess you have people to interview and stuff,” Barry said a little frantically, and Iris tried very hard to hide an amused smile. He backed a little bit away from them. Barry Allen may be a little awkward, but he was almost the cute kind of awkward that you could see in a movie. The kind of awkward, Iris previously hadn´t thought actually existed in real life. “I am gonna go do my thing.”

 _Dork_ Iris thought to herself, as she followed Eddie into the building behind the trees. The windows in the place were big, practically huge, so unless nobody had been home last night, somebody had to have seen something. But Barry Allen might be an awkward dork, but at least he seemed like a more fun guy to work with than the last cut and dry guy they´d gotten assigned to their case.

…

“Earth to Barry!”

He was ripped out of his thoughts, to find detective Iris West standing in the doorway to his lab, practically smiling like the sun. _Fuck that was a nice smile_. Barry smiled back to her, that kind of just seemed like the way to go here. Iris brushed a loose strand of hair behind her ear. He wasn´t paying specific attention to that, definitely not, not at all. Her hair looked really soft. “Hey detective. Wh- what are you doing here?”

He´d been working on a couple of different cases, having different analyses to finish, over the last two days since he´d been at her and Thawne´s crime scene. But he´d been getting a little bit distracted more than once. Because he´d not counting on running into a cute and pretty detective out by that apartment building, and he was pretty sure he was getting a crush on her, from the handful of times he´d seen her since, which hadn´t exactly been his plan. She should really just put her hair in a ponytail, because she had to brush it away from her face again.

“I could ask you the same thing,” Iris replied, smiling amused. She stopped in front of him, and he looked down at her. She was short too. Barry must have looked like a literal question mark, as he stood there staring at her, because she immediately decided to elaborate. That was a good thing, as he had no idea what she was actually getting at. “It´s late. Practically everyone else has gone home. I was about to do the same thing.”

“Oh,” Barry said, and looked at the clock on the wall. It was way past 11 PM. He had had a lot of late nights in the lab, but this was the latest one in a long while. “Right. I was just finishing up the report for you and detective Thawne, but if you can wait like 10 minutes I´ll come along.”

Iris grinned, and it dawned on Barry what he´d just said. _Crap, crap that´s not what I meant._ But Iris didn´t look like she was angry with him, or embarrassed by him or anything. Just kind of like she thought he was funny, which was better than both option 1 or 2. “I mean- not going home with you obviously. Just if you want me to tag along with you, I can, until we go to our _separate_ homes.”

“You´re cute,” Iris said quietly, and Barry may have beamed at her a little bit. She smiled smugly before she spoke again, almost as if she knew something he didn´t. That was alarming. But he couldn´t shake the 2 words, she had just said from his head, so he wasn´t paying too much attention to the smug smile. “And I can totally wait ten minutes for company.”

“Great,” Barry replies, and Iris laughs quietly. She sits down on a table, he´s not currently using for anything and watches quietly as he finishes his work for the night. In reality, he could probably stick around for longer than those ten minutes, but he is not afraid to admit to himself, that he´d rather have Iris´ company than finish up that report tonight. Singh could yell at him tomorrow.

…

“Hey Barry, got time for a coffee break?” Iris greeted him, as she entered the lab. Barry looked up from his work, and if Iris wasn´t kidding herself he looked like he´d been asleep. Because he looked more than slightly startled and his hair was a mess. However, the bedhead kind of suited him, even if Iris would never say that out loud. _No wonder Singh is yelling at you all the time though._

“Don´t you have cases to solve?” Barry asked, and yep he was definitely sleepy. Iris tried to hide her amused smile. If she´d learnt one thing, over the last week she´d worked with Barry, it was that he could be quite a bit of a mess occasionally. He rubbed his palms against his eyes, and suppressed a yawn. He sounded more teasing when he spoke again. “ _Detective_ West.”

“Eddie is trying to get a hold of a jackass detective in Keystone,” Iris replied offhandedly, and stopped on the opposite side of his work desk, and leant against it, looking at him. Barry collected some of his scattered papers in a pile, not meeting her eyes. “Said jackass detective is not answering any forms of communication currently known to mankind. And apparently my being impatient and pacing is not particularly helpful. Thus he told me to go do something else.”

“So getting coffee is what you decided on?” Barry asked, with a facial expression that said something along the lines of _For real?_ Iris just grinned, and patted him on the arm. Barry looked overly aware of her hand, and Iris quickly stopped.

“No, getting coffee with my favorite lab rat was what I decided on,” Iris said with a smirk. Barry looked down into the ground at that, and looked to smile quietly to himself. If Iris wasn´t kidding herself, he was actually blushing. She didn´t know why she was noticing it, or why he would be blushing at lab rat. It wasn´t exactly the most flattering nickname. “Besides, you look like you could use it.”

The implication of her words looked to slowly dawn on him. Barry´s horrified, deer in the headlights expression was practically adorable, Iris wasn´t going to lie there. “You didn´t see that,” he defended himself. He buried his face in his hands. She knew few people who could be as awkward as Barry Allen could. “Please tell me, you didn´t see that.”

“I´m afraid I did,” Iris said and smiled an amused, maybe slightly teasing smile to him. He looked a lot like his world was ending in that moment, and Iris wondered if this was the first time it had happened. “But I´m not telling Singh if that helps.”

“Trust me,” Barry replied, and was clearly very relieved at that. That didn´t help with the amused smile on Iris´ face, in fact it made it stick like permanent marker.  “It really really does.”

“Now come on,” Iris said, and brushed her hand through his hair to make it slightly less of a mess. She definitely didn´t think about that, before she did it. She quickly retracted her hand, and Barry looked at it, as if it was from another planet. Iris decided that the best option clearly was to move for the door, and head out for coffee as quickly as possible. “I´m paying for a Jitters run.”

…

“Patty Spivot asked you out?” Caitlin asked in slight disbelief. Barry walked in between her and one of the other CSIs Cisco Ramon from the morgue. They´d both been down to the morgue on separate cases, and they´d ended up talking. The two were the only people he could really call work friends, except Iris maybe. Even though they had less opportunity to talk since the case was solved, but they had still talked a bit every now and again. She had even dropped coffee or muffins off in his lab once or twice, when she and detective Thawne had been by Jitters for whatever reason. After a while he occasionally returned the favor.

“Why is that so surprising?” Barry asked and tried not to sound too offended. Sure, it had been a while, since he´d last been on a date, but he could date people couldn´t he? Caitlin had finished her work for the day, so they´d decided to head back up into the daylight. “Besides, she is great and I wanna go out with her, so why not?”

“That´s not actually the surprising part,” Cisco cut Caitlin off, before she got a chance to say anything else. But Caitlin didn´t look to complain, which meant Cisco might actually have guessed what she thought about. It wouldn´t surprise him if they had, the two of them worked incredibly well together. The only one Caitlin was better friends with, was her fiancée Ronnie. But Caitlin generally speaking wasn´t close to a lot of people.

“The surprising part is Iris,” Caitlin added, when Barry didn´t say anything. Cisco nodded quietly at that. Barry felt something fall in his chest, but he tried not to let it show. He instantly made his face blank and looked from one of them to the other.

“What about Iris?” Barry asked, pretending to play dumb. He wasn´t very good at it. Especially because, the instant his friends mentioned Iris, he did feel a little like this was a terrible idea, and he had to say no to Patty. He quickly squashed down the feeling.

“That you like her, and it´s as obvious as the fact that Cisco eats too much candy,” Caitlin said. Barry looked down into the ground, not knowing what to say in his defense. He wasn´t actually sure he had any, which was a first. Caitlin continued before Cisco could come up with a retort for the candy related insult. “Sure, go out with Patty. She´s nice enough and everything. But don´t you think you owe it to her, to at least think about your feelings for Iris first?”

“There´s nothing going on between me and Iris,” Barry said simply, and shoved his hands into his pockets. Both of them looked a little bit confused at him, either because they called his bluff instantly or because they actually believed him. Probably the former rather than the latter. “And even if I was interested in her, she´s not interested in me. Not at all.”

“How do you know?” Cisco asked, and Caitlin gave Barry a look that clearly asked the exact same question. Barry just shrugged, but neither of his friends seemed to accept that as an answer.

“I just know!” Barry bit back. He knew guys like him didn´t date girls like Iris, because he wasn´t an idiot. Iris was the kind of detective, who could probably make captain of a precinct if she threw herself into work hard enough, and he had no doubt she would. Girls like her dated other detectives or lawyers and people like that. They didn´t date a nerd, who spent most of his day stuck in a lab analyzing evidence.

“It´s your life,” Cisco mumbled quietly, and it looked like neither him nor Caitlin agreed with Barry. But really what did that matter? Patty was cool, good looking, she worked in the same department as him, and she clearly liked him. That was good enough for him. But Iris was cool too, really pretty and he hadn´t been able to get her entirely out of his head for a while now. He made his best try as he headed back to the lab though.

…

“Hey Barry!” Iris greets him, a little too enthusiastically for 8 AM on a Monday, when he turns out to be the CSI on their case, a month later again. He waves back to her. Then he immediately turns back to his work, and Iris has to admit one thing, it´s surprising to her that he was actually here before her and Eddie for once. “You´re here early.”

“Yeah, for once,” he replies a little absentmindedly, still studying some car tracks left behind by the killer. Or at least that was the theory, they could have been left behind by others, but there weren´t a lot of people in this area, even later at night. “Patty woke me up this morning, so I thought I might as well.”

“Who is Patty?” Iris asked, they´d talked a lot at the station recently, Barry was nice and he had an easy laugh. He was nerdy but still fun to hang around with, but he´d never mentioned someone called Patty. It didn´t bother Iris, of course it didn´t.

“Um, I guess she´s kind of my girlfriend,” Barry replied under his breath, and avoided Iris´ eyes. That shouldn´t sting, because she and Barry are just friends. Work friends even. So knowing that he has a girlfriend shouldn´t feel like a teensy tiny bit of a sting, but it still does. Luckily Eddie seems able to take a cue, as he quickly looks at her, like he wants to take her out of her misery, before he does just that.

“Right, what have we got so far Allen?” Eddie says, after a couple of seconds of awkward silence. If Eddie hadn´t had a fiancée, Iris could have probably kissed and married him right then and there.

“It looks like the body was just dumped here,” Barry replies, but he´s not looking at Iris, just like Iris isn´t really looking at him either. “I don´t think she was killed here, and the car tracks suggest someone drove her here, and dumped her in the container.”

“It´d be a good place for it,” Iris admitted, looking around the small area they were standing in, between two old and mostly abandoned buildings. She shoved her hands into her pockets. “Barely anyone lives in this part of town; the killer could have easily dumped her here without being seen.”

They didn´t talk anymore about Patty while on the crime scene. But for some reason, it still keeps nagging Iris. Eddie comments on it, when they get back in the car. “It´s not the end of the world,” he says quietly, she turned her head to look at him, as he started driving.

“What isn´t?” Iris asked.

“Allen getting a girlfriend,” Eddie replied quietly, and there was almost some kind of pity in his voice. Iris immediately smiled to reassure him everything was fine.

“Didn´t say it was,” she retorted, and tried not to sound too defensive. Eddie didn´t look particularly convinced, and Iris decided that she liked staring out the window way more, than staring at her partner´s knowing eyes.

“Not out loud no,” Eddie muttered under his breath. Iris deliberately chose to ignore that. Neither of them said another word in the car, and after they got stuck in traffic Eddie put the radio on. Iris appreciate the background noise, so she could drown out the tiny part of her that was actually considering that Eddie might be right.

…

“So that’s why I think it´s a plausible crime scene- are you okay?” Barry asked. Iris looked up from the map of the area where the body had been dumped, he´d shown her and nodded quietly. Something is clearly on her mind, and she absentmindedly brushed her long thick dark hair away from her eyes. She smiles carefully, almost as if she knows what he´s thinking, and that actually just has him more worried about her. “What´s wrong?”

“Fine yeah,” she said, still smiling. But anyone with a pair of even mildly observant eyes could see that that obviously wasn´t the case, and Barry swallowed hard, not entirely sure what to say. “Bad day is all.”

“What- what happened?” he asked, and his fingers brushed against hers without thinking. Iris actually flinched, as if she´d been scorched in that moment. There was definitely something completely wrong, and his heart sunk in his chest.

“It´s nothing Barry!” Iris snapped back at him, and she was clearly really angry with him. She looked back down at the map, and bit her lip. There was something tense in the air, and he didn´t know what to say. When Iris spoke again, she sounded calmer. “I´m sorry, just don´t want to talk about it.”

“Why not?” Barry pressed, which he maybe shouldn´t have, because Iris´ expression grew harder again.

“It´s not like we´re friends outside of work anyway,” Iris said calmly, and met his eyes. It felt like someone punched him in the gut. “We don´t talk about everything with each other.”

“What do you mean?” Barry asked, and his voice was shaking slightly.

“Oh let´s see, you forgot to mention you had a girlfriend,” Iris bit back, and a lump caught in Barry´s throat, as realization hit him.

“Wait, this is about Patty?” Barry asked, and instantly regretted it, when he saw the look of death Iris gave him. He wouldn´t be surprised if she actually punched him in the face at that. He wouldn´t have blamed her too much. “You´re this riled up about her?”

“What? No it isn´t!” she protested. Her bottom lip is quivering, and a part of him knows it´s his fault. But for now he´s not entirely sure, his brain is working properly.

He knows he is making a mistake, even before he speaks the next sentence. He says it anyway, because for some reason he still feels like he has to say it. He has a lump in his throat, but he ignores that feeling, and speaks anyway. “I think it is.”

Barry instantly feels like the worst person in the world, when he sees the broken look that flickers across her face for a second, before it´s back to angry. Her voice doesn´t hint at anything when she speaks again, if anything it´s too cool, too calm. But her face definitely tells him one thing, he´s messing up, and he´s messing up bad. “Call Eddie when you have the report done.”

He shouldn´t have assumed this was about Patty, he knows that, he knows he is a goddamn idiot. He is also an idiot, because his relationship with Patty isn´t nearly as serious, as she might think it is, even if this wasn´t about Patty at all. So he tries to make up for it. “Iris-“

“I´ll see you,” she says without looking at him, and then she moves for the door. She gives him the silent treatment for 3 weeks, and it makes him completely miserable. He is honestly starting to think she might never talk to him again. That´s when he has a run in with known felon Mark Mardon and a flight of stairs.

…

Iris stomped into the ER, just about ready to kick Barry Allen all the way into next week. How the hell does a CSI get himself hurt on a crime scene? They weren´t supposed to do that! CSIs didn´t even carry guns for crying out loud! She paused for a couple of seconds in the doorway to the mostly empty ER, where Barry sat by the farthest wall. He was leaning his head against the brick wall, and other than a cask and some bandages, he looked okay. She hated how she immediately felt relieved, and the anger started to fade from her. She marched towards him, and once she stopped in front of Barry, the guy next to him looked up at her. “You´re Iris I am guessing?” the guy said. “He kept asking for you.”

“That´s me,” Iris said, and she recognized the voice from the phone, one of Barry´s colleagues had been the one to call her. They had been working on a big case of her dad´s, so the station had apparently decided to send two CSIs. Iris had caught the guy´s name, despite the fact, that she hadn´t paid nearly enough attention to the rest of the phone call, after he had told her Barry was in the ER. “I´m assuming you are Cisco Ramon?”

He nodded and rose up from his chair; Barry opened his eyes and looked up at her. Annoyingly enough he chose to smile at her, a small but happy and blessed smile. She didn´t smile back. He was covered in dirt and clearly had been doing something. But her words weren´t nearly as pissed off as she would have liked them to be, once she spoke to him. They were softer, more worried, and they shouldn´t be. “How the hell did you do this?”

“To be fair,” Barry started to protest, he was clearly still exhausted. Iris crossed her arms. “I didn´t do that much, just turned out the uniforms hadn´t searched the place well enough. I ended up getting pushed down the stairs from the second floor by the suspect. Hurt like hell.”

“You´re an idiot,” she said bluntly. She tried to stop her voice from shaking, as she continued. “You´re a goddamn massive idiot. I hope you know that.”

“Sorry,” he replied, and winced. His hair was a goddamn mess, but Iris wasn´t paying any specific attention to that, or that it as usual suited him. Because fuck his hair honestly. “If it helps I´m really glad you came here. I missed you.”

“It doesn´t,” she said, her words softer and quieter by the end of that sentence, than she had originally intended them to be. He smiled softly at that. There was an awkward silence for maybe a couple of moments then, but when Barry spoke again, he somehow managed to catch her completely off guard. It almost felt like she somehow forgot to breathe.

“Patty wasn´t my girlfriend,” he said quietly, his voice not telling how he felt about that particular piece of information, but he definitely wasn´t sad about it. All Iris could do was stare at him, not having any clue what to say now. What the hell did he expect her to say to that? “We didn’t really have much of a thing at all. I´m sorry I said she was. I don´t know why I told you that, or maybe I do actually-“

“Why are you telling me this now?” Iris asked her voice suddenly barely audible. It would be underestimating to say her heart was pounding, and she didn´t even know why. Maybe he´d just had a sudden fit of honesty, it didn´t actually have to mean anything that he told her now.

“Because I like you Iris. I like you a lot, and I dunno maybe the broken arm and the bang to the head kind of-“ She decided not to let him finish, and instead she bent down to kiss him. Barry responded instantly, and met her halfway, leaning into her touch as she cupped his chin. He had his cask free hand in her hair, running his fingers through it, and Iris sighed quietly. It felt like her head was floating, and her heart was beating at light speed. He pulls her closer to him, wrapping his unbroken arm around her waist instead.

Once he is standing up, he sways a little bit, clearly still not 100% The kiss is a little sloppy, the angle starts out as a little awkward, but Iris knows it´s the best kiss she´s ever had. He let out a quiet moan, as she sucked down on his bottom lip. She could keep kissing Barry for a really long time, if it was up to her. From the soft, practically adoring smile, Barry gave her once they pulled away from each other, Iris would say it looked like he was agreeing with her.

…

Barry´s mood instantly brightened, once Iris showed in the doorway to the lab. He beamed at her, and she was beaming right back. “Hey lab rat,” she said teasingly, and stopped right in front of him. She stood on her toes to press a kiss against the bridge of his nose.

He cupped her face in his hands, and she smiled up at him. She was wearing a tank top, and a pair of jeans, because of the warmth today she´d had to drop the jacket. Her dark hair was done up in a bun to keep it away from her slightly damp neck. Not that he was complaining. “God, you´re gorgeous.”

“Good thing, you´re my boyfriend then,” Iris retorted affectionately, and licked her lips. That was all the invitation Barry needed, as he leant down to kiss her. He immediately moved his hands from her cheeks to her hips, letting his fingers slip under the cotton of the top. Barry groaned in the back of his throat, as Iris tucked slightly at his hair, and ran his tongue over her bottom lip.

“Hands lower,” Iris said quietly, as they eventually had to pull away from each other to catch their breaths.

“Iris we´re in the lab!” he protested under his breath, and Iris was clearly trying to fight an amused smile. He loved that look on her, which obviously was helping her case a whole fucking lot.

“And it´s lunch break, no one´s here except you and me,” Iris replied, and her smile was positively dirty, and fuck he was so utterly screwed. Barry bit back a groan, but did as she asked, and hunched her up. She wrapped her legs around his waist, and grinded her hips against his, making her intent crystal clear. Barry almost lost his balance, but managed to balance them against a nearby wall. “That´s better,” Iris said with a quiet grin, and Barry laughed into their kiss.

“Iris!” someone yelled from the hallway, and Iris instantly froze. Barry gave her a puzzled glance, as she promptly quit kissing. 100 possible scenarios ran through his head, and none of them were particularly good.

“Shit!” she whispered, and untangled her legs from him once again, and sprinted for the corner, leaving Barry more than slightly confused. The voice in the hallway sounded like it was moving closer to the lab, and Barry didn´t know what to do, so he just grabbed the first, the best file on the table and looked through it. Then one of the detectives showed up in the doorway, and looked at him. Barry didn´t recognize him, when he looked up from the file.

“Allen, have you seen my daughter?” the detective asked, and Barry had a sneaking suspicion he knew where this was going.

“Your daughter?” Barry asked, hoping he was just slightly convincing at playing dumb.

“Yeah, Iris. The other detective West,” Mr. West replied with a nice smile. He didn´t look like he was suspecting that Barry knew exactly where his daughter was. Iris shook her head violently in her corner, and gave him a look of death, so Barry very quickly decided on an answer.

“Nope,” Barry said with a big grin. Iris clearly looked relieved. “Haven´t seen her.”

Mr. West left quietly, giving him another look, and once she was sure that her father was gone, she came out of her corner, and stopped in front of Barry. She put her hands on his shoulders, and Barry smiled down at her. “Thank you.”

“So your dad is a cop too,” Barry said, and Iris nodded. She let her hand brush across his cheek, and he leant into her touch. “He doesn´t have a habit of chasing after your boyfriends with guns blazing does he?”

The giggle that escaped Iris´ mouth was positively adorable, and she looked up at him, clearly on the verge of just laughing at him. “Are you planning on giving him a reason to?”

“No,” he promised her and let his fingers brush through her hair. He leant his forehead against hers, and she let out a content sigh. He closed his eyes and just let himself enjoy this moment. “Definitely not.”


End file.
